How I Learned Chinese

hi there steve kaufman here and today i want to talk about how i learned mandarin chinese [Music] now before we get into that if you enjoy these videos uh please subscribe you can click on the bell to get notifications and by all means come and join me at link to learn languages now how i went about learning mandarin chinese first of all let me tell you that i was 23 at the time and the reason i started learning mandarin chinese is because i was working for the canadian government trade commissioner service and canada was about to recognize the people's republic of china they wanted to train some people in chinese i was i was lucky enough to be selected and off i went to hong kong actually i had a choice of going to the defense language institute in monterey but i decided instead i would rather go to hong kong which is a chinese environment although not a mandarin speaking environment so i took about a year to get my level up to what was a sort of british foreign service exam translating newspaper editorials from english to chinese chinese to english i had to write a diplomatic note in chinese by hand and obviously speak and translate and so forth took me about a year but the important thing about being in hong kong is that it was not a mandarin-speaking environment so that you know my total immersion in chinese was done without the benefit of being surrounded by people who speak the language so how was i able to do that when i think back on it now the main thing and i'll go into detail as to how i went about learning you know their characters and and learning to read and speak but but the main thing was the motivation and that's the big story for me china represented uh you know this exotic world civilization culture and and i'll get into more detail on that but but i needed to be very much motivated because it was a lot of work i had to learn characters i had to learn the tones and i was motivated by my interest in the culture today it's much easier to learn languages we didn't have access to mp3 files we had great big clunky uh open real tape recorders most uh texts had no uh you know obviously you didn't have online dictionaries you didn't have online anything today we have link where i learned you know i started learning russian at age 60 on link i started learning arabic and persian i'm still learning them i'm 75 it's just so much easier um the whole you know the the iphone the the internet everything has made language learning easier including link of course but back then we didn't have that so i needed very strong motivation of course today if you have all of the advantages of learning with modern technology and you're motivated then you've got the best of both worlds and you need to be motivated so to me the motivation was that here was this ancient civilization unknown to me uh you know 4 000 years of history chinese talk about 5 000 years but there's 4 000 years in terms of you know some kind of record of some government there and for long periods of history china was the most developed country in the world uh probably up until you know three four five hundred years ago and all of a sudden this this self-satisfied sophisticated almost world unto itself center of the sort of the culture of east asia all of a sudden comes into contact with a civilization western european or not necessarily western but european civilization that has benefited from the uh you know the science the enlightenment the the industrial revolution and and has gun powder now and has other technical advantages that the chinese don't have and they're faced with the fact that they are at a disadvantage and so here's this new culture how do you react to it when i think of say the qing dynasty which was actually a manchurian dynasty but more or less assimilated into chinese culture and then in 1911 you have the the what they call the nationalist revolution and all of a sudden it's no longer you know an imperial state it's some kind of republic but that period from 1911 through to 1949 was to me the most fascinating period of china when i was learning in hong kong we had to read the people's daily and mouse thoughts and all of that kind of stuff and it wasn't very interesting because a lot of the sort of communist boilerplate uh you know ideology and stuff is just a lot of repetition of of certain themes that are kind of reorgan divorced from reality but the novels of the 20th century in china the the struggles as as intellectuals try try to come to terms with this new civilization and how much of the new civilization should they you know accept or integrate into their civilization what can they maintain of theirs to me there must have been an amazing uh you know intellectual struggle and of course then there were different you know answers there was a communist answer there was a you know who sure was more of a liberal answer there was more of a fascist answer there were lots of answers as was the case in many other countries and i'm discovering that in arabic or in persian when you see a 19th century egypt or 19th century iran have to deal with this you know collision now with these very arrogant westerners who want to impose their uh will uh on this very proud civilization so that to me was was interesting so if i look at what i did you know first of all you can see behind me lots of chinese books okay and so i did a lot of reading i started with this 20 lectures in chinese culture and i must admit that you know reading about the history of china you know 1500 years ago or more recently some of the declarations by by uh you know um sun yat-sen for example the sort of nationalist revolution and then you know mao's thought and all of that reading about it in chinese was very exhilarating for me i followed that 20 lectures book up with and i should say that before i got into that before i started reading we had this where i went to school new asia college in hong kong kowloon side it was part of the yale and china program so there and there's so many books in the yale and china program and the starter book for them was chinese dialogues which was a series of dialogues spoken rapid fire or so it seemed to me and they used their own uh transliteration system it wasn't opinion so i became accustomed to words and sounds for a good i think two or three months before we started into reading and learning the characters once i had some characters then i could get into the 20 lectures in chinese culture although we had no audio for it which is unfortunate and also this intermediate reader in uh chinese modern chinese lots of emphasis on patterns and to me the secret to learning chinese is don't use a traditional dictionary because it's very time consuming and you'll forg in any case any dictionary once you close the dictionary you've forgotten what was there but with the chinese dictionary and i got lots of them it takes so long to look a word up it's it's a complete waste of time i only dealt with reading material where there was a glossary behind each chapter of course nowadays that's no longer necessary because you have online dictionaries and so if you're reading a link you can look up words immediately you can save them to a database there's so many more things that you can do now that weren't available back in those days but so the first thing is don't use a traditional dictionary which today you don't need to do and the second thing was don't get tied up in grammatical explanations because the the grammarians tried to get in there and create all kinds of terms and stuff i never looked at any of that stuff i dealt strictly with patterns here's how they say it and here's how we say it in english here's how they say it in chinese and if i do enough reading and eventually enough listening i will get used to those patterns in chinese without worrying about grammatical explanations oh i did want to show you you know as i said passion is part of it obviously and i like the the characters and i had these 1000 flash cards with the what's known as the radical which determines you know the sort of the meaning of the character to some extent was in red and i went through those i had sort of a self-styled space repetition system that i used but eventually of course you come to terms with the tones and it's very difficult to remember the tones of individual words so i listen to a lot of xiangshan and i have at home i have a lot of cds of xiangtong i just grabbed a few here my favorite is hobalin and he wasn't able to grab one of his but these shengshou are comedians it's like a comic dialogue and they exaggerate the pronunciation as they're trying to be funny and and i just found them you know especially hobalin i just it was almost like listening to music [Music] um [Music] that helped me with my tones because you have to get the tones inside a phrase of some kind so if i hear these tones these these uh phrases bouncing around in my brain it helped me even though the uh the sunshine comic dialogues contain a lot of references to historical characters or to literature and things of that nature that i didn't you know had no idea of uh so i didn't understand that well but it was the music of those dialogues that helped me so that was the other thing that was very useful for me in learning tones is to do a lot of listening to that kind of material now i have here two boxes of cds of which i haven't yet had time to listen to i kind of set them aside you know home no hmong and i don't know how many how many cds and i've got you know countless uh sunshine cds and and historical cds and there's so much stuff and of course nowadays you don't even have to go i used to go to when i was traveling into china uh you know in 2003 maybe when i went there to promote my book uh so i bought all this stuff but now of course you can go online and you can find youtube videos which by the way you can import into link with the uh subtitles and that becomes a lesson and so there's so many more things that you can do that i couldn't do back in those days so just to summarize and i i would recommend that you check out the video that i did on how i learned french and that was of course the first call it language that i wanted to learn to a level of fluency and compare that to my experience with learning chinese and you'll see that the common denominator is that i i developed a passion for certain aspects of chinese civilization of french civilization and that's what sort of drove me to overcome the obvious difficulties and the difficulties are not insurmountable chinese for example has the advantage that once you have characters it's easy to build vocabulary because they are in the new words in the way we understand words are combinations of different characters the grammar in chinese is if i compare to slavic grammar it's very very straightforward but you have to learn the characters and you have to tackle the tones so with each language there are difficulties to overcome these difficulties you have to basically have a passion and i'm not going to speak in chinese today but you could refer to some of my videos where i have had discussions in chinese and yeah i've maintained it i've maintained it and even though i don't have much occasion to speak chinese uh i think i speak chinese better today than when i wrote my exam exam back in 1969 even though i was able to write then and today i would have a lot of difficulty in fact i can't write by hand in chinese i can write on the computer but back then i could but today because i occasionally revisit chinese and i listen to cds and content and we have chinese friends here in vancouver i think i speak better now than i did back then so there you have it i'm kind of rushing through it so i don't i don't want this video to be too long but that's a brief uh sort of introduction on how i learned mandarin chinese thanks for listening [Music]

Channel: Steve Kaufmann - lingosteve

Views: 138,856

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Id: F3qSuT5-Xrg

Length: 13min 42sec (822 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 18 2021